Post by: RE on February 25, 2015, 12:48:22 AM
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Trying to figure out exactly how any Money achieves and holds its value is very difficult. In all but the most simple systems which are little more than Barter, you quickly develop a level of complexity that is confounding, mainly because it is always so self-referential. In this exercise, I’m going to try to elucidate the process used over the centuries to not just Create Money, which is primary, but also to Control Money once created. I have some basic ideas here, but I have no idea how this post will come out in the end. It’s a very difficult problem.
Starting Point: You can’t have Money without Surplus in Basic Needs, but neither is Surplus by itself sufficient. You also have to have control over at least One basic conduit of Wealth, which is in the Begining Food. Why is this so?
First look at a pre-Agricultural Hunter-Gatherer Society. Said society can be in Surplus, but they don’t need or use money, because each member of the society can take from the surplus as much as he or she needs. You may Barter things, but you do not need an intermediary of money to do that. Its a very simple system, but allows for virtually no Savings, and none are necessary as long as you always have and expect surplus. A small group of H-Gs in a large territory not competing with others are always in surplus. So no Money develops in such a society.
The Ag society though as soon as it develops REQUIRES money. First thing is, the Ag Society develops a Surplus even beyond that of the H-G society, so much so that the population begins to expand rapidly. The Ag system also works on a seasonal level where large amounts of Grain are collected up at harvest time and must be stored in Warehouses. Such intitial efforts are Communal, with a Tribe all working together on a Patch of land to farm it. To do so though, they must Claim Ownership over that land. This requires then the next level, a Military to protect and defend that land.
Its at this point you have the 3 most necessary elements involved for the beginning of a Monetary system. One is Ownership of the Land, at first Communal by the Tribe as a whole. Second is Storage of large quantities of Food in a Warehouse. 3rd is developing a Military group responsible for protecting both your land you grow on and the goods stored in the warehouse.
The Military component quckly becomes the most Dominant one, in the early stages led by the most powerful Warrior who all in the tribe respect and fear. This person become “King”. Call him Nimrod. The King then becomes the Symbol of the State, and all it “owns” and “produces” (really “controls” and “extracts”) belongs to him. The monetary system develops as a means for the King to distribute out surplus to his Loyal Subjects.
The money develops when the Counting begins in the Warehouse of Grain. Whatever is in there is represented in the Count by Credits, which can then be symbolized in a token. Only as many Tokens are produced as there is grain to cover them in redemption. Precious metal coinage works well for this in the beginning. All the precious metals the King has acquired by whatever means care coined up, and appropriately valued so that there are not more coins than Grian that can be redeemed. This is Hard Money in extremis. It has an absolute value measured in the Food it represents.
The King can now hand out the Tokens to his Military protectors and also pay the oversears of slaves or serfs who work the land and grow the food. These folks are not paid in coinage, they merely get a small portion of the food they produce for subsistence living.
Problems arise as the society grows. In the beginning, the surplus of food being produced exceeds the amount of precious metals available for coinage, so the food drops in price. A few things can happen here, one is that the King can stop paying out so much coinage to his Military and Overseer classes, raising the price of the food up again, allowing the King to keep more Precious metal in the treasury and more food in the warehouse. Everybody is still beign fed here, King has more in the Treasury, and besides that surplus in the grain warehouse grows. It keeps a pretty long while, but eventually will rot or simply become ridiculous to save any more of. Like putting up more than a few years of Preps, it gets ridiculous.
So you start to Trade the surplus with others who don’t produce so much food and expansion begins of the system. Peripheral areas pay in more Gold and Silver and also begin to produce other things besides food which the Money becomes useful for paying for.
At this point the system has become vastly more complex. The Tokens no longer represent an absolute amount of Grain in a warehouse, but rather the value of all Goods and Services being produced in this ever growing system. Bourses or Trading Markets develop which set relative values for everything being done in the society, which as it increases in size and velocity needs a rapidly increasing Money supply to handle. The Precious metal coinage does not increase at the same rate in most circumstances, so in order to have more “money” available, base metals are used to produce some coins, which pretty much can be produced at will. Money is getting softer during this period, but so long as Da Goobermint doesn’t go wild coining up the base metals, it doesn’t devalue while the system is expanding.
The trading system begins to undergo many stressors at this point. Regardless of whether there is some whether or plague related Famine or not, at times some folks in control of large swaths of land simply take them out of production, locally raising the cost of grain. This allows them to extract out more precious metals from the buyers, and this money goes into their Basement Safes. I’m sure you can see the analogue here with how Oil prices get manipulated by creating periodic “shortages”, even if there is plenty of Oil in the ground.
The “successful’ society utilizing Money has now reached the point where there is just a ton of Surplus in the society, so much so that there isn’t a whole lot of need for Workers or paying people much coinage and most of the PMs are sequestered away inthe Basement Safes of a few Pigmen. At this point though, some folks cannot even get hold of the few base metal coins to buy any food, though there is plenty in the warehouse. The society needs no more Serfs, nor does it even need more Artisans and Toolmakers. Only a few of the most successful of these are necessary for the King and his Oligarchy, so these New Professions start to see Unemployment also, along with Serfs. The economy slows to a crawl, basically because it produced too much surplus too quickly, and then developed an overburden of a population with no remunerative work available.
Social Discontent rises here amongst the Poor, at which point it becomes necessary to “Give Away” the surplus to these folks or face a Revolution. Except soon as you do start “giving it away”, the Money loses further meaning. Why work as a Soldier and put your life onthe line for a few coins when Bread and Circuses are beign provided to the masses to keep them quiet and entertained? The Roman period of Bread & Circuses has the direct analogue of the Great Society program through to just recently.
Eventually, regardless of actual production or extraction ability of food outta da ground or Oil under da ground, production of both begins to fall because there is no money flowing around the market which will buy it. Now you really DO get your Revolts, which really do require you to start increasing the size of the Army and handing out money from the Treasury, until the Treasury is bankrupt of PMs. Now, there are Gold coins inthe hands of the Soldiers, but there is little being produced to buy with those Gold coins. At this point, you reach the end of the line for this iteration of a cycle, and not until the Wars and internal conflicts get resolved can you begin a rebuilding process to do the same thing over again.
The whole process here has occurred countless number of times since Nimrod, and for so long as there always was a real Surplus in the environment, the only thing that caused the famine and scarcity problem was the collapse of the monetary system.
This iteration is different than those were. The repeated expansions and collapses culminated with the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuel resource, which put the entire globe into such great Surplus that it rapidly expanded in population numbers consuming this last great resource base. Upon its collapse, what is left out there isn’t enough to expand on again after just the typical wars knocking down Biblical numbers of around 25% of the population.
The monetary system doesn’t really collapse from Scarcity normally, it collapses from too much Surplus and hoarding of currency. Periodically though due to overextension and resource depletion in specific locations along with the vicissitudes of Nature, real scarcity does rear its head, which causes a collapse from the opposite direction. In this case, money may be circulating in the economic system, but it is a shortage of goods rather than a shortage of money which produces the disruption. The end result isn’t much different since you still end up with a situation where extant money won’t buy goods, but the causative factors are different.
The Period we are working into now is a synergy of both problems, on the Global Scale. On the one hand, there is a consolidation of Money going on removing much of it from real circulation through the Banking System; while at the SAME time resources are depleting on a global level. As long as these two parameters move in tandem, you get a shrinkage, but not a collapse. You only get a collapse when on the gross level BOTH fail, and that has yet to occur. When it does occur though, its a lot worse than one or the other of the other types of collapse.
In this last iteration of the cycle, rather than Food in Warehouses serving as the underlying basis of Money, the Thermodynamic Energy of Fossil Fuels underpinned the money. This by extension through the Industrial Food Apparatus includes Food, but food is only part of the total production of the society. Over time, food becomes arbitraged out of value, since all it does is support “Useless Eaters”. Rather than produce more food, the monetary system serves to encourage the production of more Fuel, to perpetuate itself. Thus you get your Ethanol production for Carz reather than Corn for Peoples.
This is a Dynamic Shrinkage Model, basically serving to reduce population while at the same time conserving resource, which very well might be a planned methodology and could work assuming the circulating money and available energy resource decline in near parallel terms. The problem it suffers is one of instability all along the way. Because the monetary system serves as a proxy for value for many OTHER things besides just fossil fuel energy, malinvestment through the system can collapse the monetary system too fast to maintain a stable equilibrium with the collapsing energy supplies. Obvious example for this problem is the collapsing McMansion Market, but it extends into Carz, Factories and many other “Assets”. Unless those assets can be halted from complete collapse in value, the money supply can’t be shrunk at the steady rate necessary to pace out to energy supply shrinkage. You then run into the old problem of plenty of resource available relative to the population, but insufficeint working money to distribute said resource.
This of course is why we see the process occuring of the CBs pushing out Credit to keep the energy market from locking up completely. They are just trying to keep pace with the real shrinkage, but not issue so much credit as to render the currencies dependent on the credit markets to completely lose value either. Its a system under great stress here on a daily basis.
As long as linearity can be maintained between the energy markets and the money supply, the system can continue to function, albeit in ever smaller “boutique” economies all the time. The linearity gets disrupted either by a local implison of a given credit market or by a local disruption of Oil supply of a threshold level magnitude. Uncelar how large that disruption has to be on an absolute value level to reach the threshold, but one suspects that either a Blockade of the Straights of Hormuz on the Energy Level or the credit collapse of a country the size of say Italy would be sufficient here to disturb the equilibrium too much and send the relative economics into a tailspin.
Money and Oil are EQUIVALENTS in the current society, mainly as defined by the Dollar as the most popularly accepted Proxy for Oil. To keep the overall system running at any level, even a small Boutique level, a parity must be maintained between the currency and the available energy. To do that, a vast portion of the population has to be cut off from Credit to buy the Oil, but not so fast that the money loses its value or so fast as the Oil depletes in its availabilty at reasonable EROEI. its a Tightrope that has to be walked very carefully.
So far, our Illuminati Masters have walked the Wire very well. I do not discount the possibility they can walk the wire to the Other Side and maintain the equilibrium all the way through the spin down. This is POSSIBLE. IMHO though, it is Unlikely. Much like catching a Raindrop on a Knife Edge and controlling how the water splits up, the level of instability here is simply too great. One side or the other of the Energy-Money Equation will exceed controllable parameters, and then you get a Cascade Failure. Whe that occurs, all Bets are OFF. There is no maintaining a Core in such a situation, there IS no “core”.
I cannot say this one is “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.” I can only say to you IMHO that it IS Coming and will come inevitably, just as even the biggest Mountains inexorably are washed into the Sea. You must not despair here and think all is lost, with the outcomes Inevitable and Written in Stone. They are not. You just have to be patient and WAIT for the Failure of the Conduits, for when they do fail in earnest, it will be a different ballgame altogether. Fail they will. I GUARANTEE it.
RE
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Post by: RE on February 25, 2015, 12:50:09 AM
Discuss this article at the Economics Table of the Diner
In the first part of this series, I took a Big Picture view of how money comes to be created from the resource base of a society, in the beginning Food. In the Age of Oil, the money serves as a more direct Proxy for Energy in the form of Fossil Fuels. This because food production is subsidiary to energy production, since with copious avaialble energy copious food can be produced through the Industrialized food apparatus. In this part, we will look at the relationship as it evolved through to today between the Money and Energy, along with its Military component.
The conversion of money into a proxy for the energy markets came about through the mid-19th century with the monopolization of the Oil Industry by Standard Oil. With the vast amount of Oil under its control, in order to then be able to sell that Oil there needed to be a vast expansion of Credit issued to the population to buy this Oil. This is why the Oil Biz and the Banking Biz are so closely intertwined. Essentially, John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil began increasing Dollar Credit available so that then people would have Money available to buy his Oil. The Oil at this time is priced very cheap relative to the credit price of the money, and the expansion of the Ponzi begins.
In the beginnning this was very chaotic, because it was happenning during the “Free Banking” era between the collapse of the 2nd Bank of the FSofA and the institution of Da Federal Reserve. During this period, Gold was also functioning as a resource based money, a holdover from the Ag Era when Gold in limited quantity could be used to represent total food available to a population. Many smaller banks popped up issuing credit on a fractional reserve basis of their Gold holdings, but inside a manipulated energy market, their bets often went bad causing repeated Bank Runs and periods of Depression, with little circulating money available to the population.
Da Federal Reserve was created as a means to more directly control the total outward flow of Credit in conjunction with the increasing supply of Oil coming online in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century FSofA. The most powerful Banks of the Era chartered Da Fed as a Central Bank which could control the creation of credit, which they could then use as a cheap source of funds to loan out at a higher rate of interest. This removed some of the chaos from the system, putting just a few very well positioned Pigmen in control of money creation and money flow. These folks are also the same ones in control of the Oil biz itself.
Besides the production of Cheap Food, the greatest usefulness of Oil and the Energy contained therein lays in the Mechanized War Machine. Once built, large Warships and Tanks can pretty much roll over any backwater civilization out there and then expand into their locations for the purpose of further resource extraction. Prime target for this right from the get-go were vast Oil Fields being discovered in MENA. A Rapid grab for Oil amongst Industrialized Nations of Europe began, basically with the Krauts and the Brits seeking to gain hegemony over the Oil fields of MENA, since unlike the FSofA they had little to none of it on their own land. This prior to discovery of North Sea Oil of course.
So, skirmishes down in MENA between the Brits and Krauts over who “owns” what territories down there eventually leads us to WWI, which the Krauts lose mainly because the Brits have the FSofA taking their back here. Many mistakes are made in the Treaty of Versailles, their is a brief period of Mania with the Roaring 20s back in the FSofA following this war, but it never really ends. Back in Krautland, they experience the Roaring 20s as basically a time of Roaring Hyperinflation. Even in the FSofA, while F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby are doing well cateloguing the lifestyle of the Rich & Famous in the Hamptons, back in the Heartland of the FSofA Farmland is rapidly losing its value as industrialized apparatus makes it possible to create copious amounts of food from much less land and labor. They have plenty of food to ship over to starving Krauts, but the Krauts have no working money to buy it with. WWII comences shortly thereafter, with the FSofA entering the fray when over on the Pacific side of this now Global battle over industrialization and Oil the Nips with their backs to the wall go Kamikaze on Pearl Harbor.
Both Wars are GREAT for the FSofA, in the sense they give plenty of Employment for J6P in the trenches and also further ramp up the power and influence of the Military. By the time WWII ends, the FSofA has an ENORMOUS industrial base it used to make things like Tanks and Planes and Bombs, but now in order for this stuff not to be complete malinvestment, the owners of said factories turn them to “peacetime” usage. The Tank factories start producing Carz, the Bomber Factories start producing 707 passenger Jets, and the Bomb Factories start producing Ag Fertilizer.
MASSIVE LSPW (Large Scale Public Works) Projects are undertaken both in Europe in the form of the Marshall Plan and the FSoA in the form of the Interstate Highway System as a means to build out the Ponzi, employ vast numbers of workers in construction, which then becomes the basis for a subsidiary parasite economy of Small Bizness to develop as the Credit Money flows out copiously, along with the then copiously flowing Oil, not just from FSofA Oil fields, but also the newly aquired Saudi Fields and Iranian fields.
Along the way, from the 1950s into the early 1970s it begins to become obvious to folks like M. King Hubbert that real Oil Production rates and discoveries are falling and as a result energy prices go on a steady upward climb. The tie to the old Gold standard Ag economy is broken in 1971 when Tricky Dick closes the Gold Window and the economy goes All Fiat from that point.
This takes us into the Modern Era of many low level “mini-Wars” which continue to provide a rationale and purpose for a large Military, as well as the Bubble Creation period in consumer goods and services and Financial speculation which keeps Credit flowing Outward, Profits flowing Inward but in reality Zero to Negative real growth in the system. It becomes ever more Bloated in Global Population of Useless Eaters, and supplies of new Oil become ever harder to find and ever more expensive to develop.
The Crisis Point for the Fianancialism came first in the 1990s with the collapse of the Dot Com Bubble, but was given an Adrenaline Injection through the Sub-Prime RE Market, Credit Card Loans and Guaranteed Student Loans for Kollege. Outward flowing credit through these Markets kept the patient alive and kicking until 2008, when the Chickens came home to Roost on Lehman Brothers.
To salvage THIS problem, the Last Bubble began in earnest, the Sovereign Debt Bubble. In this iteration, all the non-performing assets are heaped onto the Tax base of Sovereign states, with the “expectation” that the populations of these countries will work as Debt Slaves into the generations of their Great Grandchildren in order to pay off ALL the malinvestment that began way back there in 1800s, with the building of the Railroads, a necessary infrastructure for extraction of Coal and Oil.
Issue is of course, in reality all that malinvestment can never be paid off, because the factories producing the Carz can’t sell them to impoverished people and the McMansions that require the people who live in them to HAVE a car in the Garage to drive to a Job that is no longer there also are Uninhabitable Malinvestement. What is left here to blow any Bubbles up on? Only War of course. In a massive debt default, War is the only way to declare Bankruptcy, and only the Winner actually can do that. The LOSER still has to pay off his debts. The Krauts got a bye on this one after WWII and as a result of the Marshall Plan used their Industrial Plant and Financialism to grow their way back to prosperity, of course all on the backs of the folks in MENA and their European brethren to the South, to whom them loaned copious amounts of money to buy their Mercedes and build Tourist Resorts on the Costa del Sur for German Pigmen to frolick on over the Summer.
I wrote the following in the first part of this series:
“As long as linearity can be maintained between the energy markets and the money supply, the system can continue to function, albeit in ever smaller “boutique” economies all the time. The linearity gets disrupted either by a local implison of a given credit market or by a local disruption of Oil supply of a threshold level magnitude. Uncelar how large that disruption has to be on an absolute value level to reach the threshold, but one suspects that either a Blockade of the Straights of Hormuz on the Energy Level or the credit collapse of a country the size of say Italy would be sufficient here to disturb the equilibrium too much and send the relative economics into a tailspin.”
With the Sovereign Debt Bubble in Europe now on its last legs, there just isn’t any bigger Debtor left upon which to shift the burden of debt accumulated since Industrialism began, mainly in the aftermath of the Civil War here in the FSofA. Though it began with the Steam Engine in the 1750s, the Agrarian Model was not completely supplanted by Industrialization until after the Civil War. So we are talking a good 150 years of debt overburden accumulated here. To wipe out this debt takes a World War that makes WWII look like a small skirmish in your backyard between your kids and their cousins. What the FORM of this war will take though remains to be seen.
What you see occuring here between Iran and the FSoA in the Blustering is mainly an attempt to keep the price of Oil propped up a while longer. Real demand for Oil is Cratering as the Konsumers run out of available credit to buy it with. Military posturing both increases Demand for Oil (how much Oil do you think both the Iranians and the FSofA consume in a Day of Wargames?), and it instills FEAR into the Market Place that what is left of the supply is soon to be CUT OFF.
Thing is here, blustering isn’t going to increase real demand for Oil from the Konsumer level, no matter how bellicose either side gets here, J6P STILL does not have money to buy this stuff at high prices. In fact at ANY price soon enough, but if they let it drop down to $2/gal for gas again you would get another Dead Cat Bounce in the economy.
At this price though, the Oil Companies/MIC cannot make a profit, nor can the Mullahs pay their bills. It is in the interest of neither side to see the price of Oil drop here. By seriously cutting production the Saudis could SLIGHTLY raise the price of Oil, but that would be made up for by Ruskies exporting more. The Saudis though need every Dollar they can get, so they are not going to lower production and sales. Sell less at a higher price maybe keeps you even, but only if somebody else doesn’t capture your market share. With declining real demand, only if ALL producers cut their production could you stay even.
So, blustering about War is the best means available to prop up the price in the Speculator market, but at the end of the line if the price is too high, it won’t move out of the storage facilities fast enough. At this point, blustering is not enough, you need a REAL War to suck up that excess Oil and to keep the FEAR level at a Fever Pitch.
It remains to be seen which side Flinches First, but once Fear Mongering stops working to keep the price up, REAL War becomes necessary. The Price cannot stay up indefinitely at high levels if the end Konsumer does not have money to pay for it. Either you go to War to REALLY restrict the supply, or you let the Price Collapse some. It could go either way here.
Certainly,a Price Collapse would be better for FSofA Konsumers and Industry. it would not be better for TBTF Banks and Oil Companies though. It would be horrific for Oil Producing countries dependent on the revenue from Oil to support their economies. Already weakened Regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran would undoubtably collapse if Oil drops into the $60 or below range again. The Iranians being the most pressured here with Sanctions are the most likely to strike out if there is a collapse in Oil prices.
The scenario as a result that seems most likely is for the Posturing to continue for so long as it keeps the prices up, but when the Storage Facilities are full to the Brim and Overflowing, then the Price will collapse and the Iranians will strike out first.
The ensuing Melee is simply too complex to figure out. Reduced real Oil supplies will take many peripheral areas with current Credit issues off the map as far as any Oil delivery whatsoever is concerned. Greeks for instance won’t be able to buy even a DROP of Oil with the New Drachma. The FSofA likely would institute a Rationing system of some sort. Normal commerce would slow to a snail’s crawl. Unemployment would skyrocket.
At this point, the War in Iran is likely Small Potatoes, since you’ll get internal Civil Wars and rebellions occuring. This is a Jenga Puzzle Moment. Currently, the Oil Supply is diminishing SLOWER than the Demand is. A full on War with Iran would flip that equation, rapidly diminshing supply and redirecting what is available to the War Effort. The “Oil Shock” to the Industrialized societies here and in Europe would be beyond belief, a very rapid change you cannot massage with monetary policy. There is simply no predicting how it goes after that.
Money and Fossil Fuel Energy became Synonymous as the Industrial Revolution took hold. The same people who took control of the Oil supply also took control of the money supply, and matched them up in a time of great Surplus of this resource. With no apparent rescue of any other form of energy sufficient to take its place, either Renewable or Nuke based, the Value of Money remains dependent on the availability of fossil fuels and their distribution and utility in the society. The distribution will shrink, and the utility will shrink as less is available to waste. The money supply of any money that actually works to buy stuff will shrink with this. In theory, this could take a long time, but is unlikely to do so because of the Jenga Paradox. At the moment, Iran appears to be the Jenga Piece of the Puzzle, that when it gets pulled will collapse the Tower of Babel. Ironic of course, since Babylon was situated in present day Iraq, just a few miles from the site of Baghdad. What Goes Around, comes Around.
RE
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Post by: RE on February 25, 2015, 12:51:33 AM
In the first two parts of this series, I took a look first at the Past of Money,
as it developed from its beginnings at the Dawn of Agriculture; then at the
present of Money as a proxy for Oil and the energy resource of Industrial
society. This final part of the series is a speculation on the Future of Money
in the dark days ahead in the near term. There will be no “Better Tomorrow”
until Money in its entirety is banished from Human consciousness, and that time
is a long ways off still. In the world of the ongoing collapse or “Long
Emergency”, money of some sort will still play its role in the distribution of
disappearing resources and consolidation of ever diminishing power.
This is of course a completely speculative post, there is no History upon which
to base it. We are breaking new ground in this collapse dynamic becasue of the
synergy between a collapsing monetary system and the collapse of the resource
base measured against the size of the current human population. The results are
needless to say quite Ugly, but it is worthwhile to noodle them out, in order to
find the possible path or paths which can take the Survivor (or more likely his
great-great-great-grandchildren) to find the true Light at the End of the
Tunnel.
The first thing which appears likely to me is that “Cash” or cash equivalents
will go the way of the Dinosaur inside all the “wired” economies, and all
transactions will go electronic. “Anonymous” money is difficult to Tax and can
move across borders too easily. While the Large Nation-States we know today
will fracture, this won’t be the end of the State, just merely a fracturing into
many smaller ones manipulated by Transnational Corporations issuing their own
money for the population to buy the products they still offer out for general
consumption.
The smaller states will be easily manipulated as their populations are desperate
for just the Basics of Living, food, water and shelter. “Signing Up” for the
new Electronic Money will allow these smaller states to stay in the Loop and
still receive the ever diminishing number of products the Corporate entities
have to offer. The only way to have “Credits” deposited to you electronic
account will be to have some sort of Job either with the State or with one of
the major Corporations working transnationally to move goods around the world,
in ever diminishing amounts. It will be all but impossible to run any sort of
Small Bizness, first off because very few people will have surplus income to buy
anything a small biz might offer, and second off because the only way they could
pay for it in Money would be through electronic funds transfer which will Tax
the individual entrepreneur of all possible profit from running a small biz.
Only the tiniest of Barter Biznesses can escape this trap, and those that do
exist will have to work covertly.
During this period, those areas of the world not wired will be joined by other
locations recently wired but not part of the “core” as their electrical
infrastructure is left to rot, their Cell Towers no longer function and they
cannot pass about electronic bits for doing commerce. These areas of the world
will fall into extreme deprivation, and Billions will die of Hunger. These
places won’t need Concentration Camps, the whole COUNTRY will be a Concentration
Camp. However, in those countries that have Resources (Oil) the Corporations
need to continue on the electronic Money “Boutique” economy, Hunger probably
doesn’t kill off the population fast enough, so Genocidal Wars will be
undertaken in these countries to rid them of the indigenous population. You
can’t leave the Have Nots alive in a given area to do mischief on your Oil
Production facilities. To effect this Genocide, likely for a while the
Corporations will pull out of these areas, taking all their Key Personnel with
them. After that, these areas will be sprayed with Biological Agents such as
Anthrax to rapidly kill off the Civilian Population. Once depopulated,
corporations will send back in teams to bring back online Oil Production
facilities. Of course, during the Die Off, many of these facilities will be
damaged beyond repair, and the Oil Fields will burn uncontrolled for years.
Inside the Core Countries, the number of people the Corporations can or will
choose to service will also grow increasingly smaller, but it will be
surreptitious and slower in their Desaparecido. In these countries, the Poor
will be swept off the streets and out of the Homeless Shelters into
Concentration Camps, until these places can hold no more and more permanent disposal becomes necessary.
The overall effect here will be to vastly depopulate the planet while still
maintaining a Core of locations sprinkled around the globe which will stay
inside the Loop of Corporate benificence, and as long as you can make yourself
useful to this system in some way, you’ll be able to earn enough Corporate Money
to survive and feed your family. You’ll probably have rules on when you can
procreate also, and if you accidentally violate them and your wife becomes
pregnant a second time, she’ll be required to have an Abortion, or else you will
lose your job with the Corporation and you and the rest of your family will get
a one way ticket to the Human Waste Reprocessing facility in San Antonio.
The effect of this shrinkage for so long as it can be Managed Efficiently (not
very long likely) is that many currently populated areas will be depopulated and
the number of Enforcers Da Goobermint will send out to these areas will become
fewer all the time. The corporate machine will retract back to plains areas
good for industrial farming to support a few Big Shitties run on the remaining
Oil they extract from depopulated areas of the world with good Oil Resource. The
“Money” of the electronic digibits they use to maintain this system will
continue to function, albeit shrinking all the time in what it can produce at
positive EROEI.
It is at some point late in this game that the individual could return to the
vacated areas and make a go of it, once the Military component has shrunk down
to merely enough to protect remaining Oil Production facilities and Industrial
Ag land and keep Order in the Big Shities they keep running through this period.
In the medium term though, going out to live off the land isn’t real possible in
most places, as any Rogue Individuals out there pose a Danger to the Core and
the Oil Production facilities. So as long as they have enough Soldiers and Bio
Weapons, they’ll periodically go out and “cleanse” these areas of any local
Human Infestation.
In order to Survive this period for how long as it lasts, the best way is to to
become a part of either the Local Goobermint of your neighborhood or become an
Apparatchik of one of the major Transnational Corporations. Surviving out on
the Periphery will be almost impossible through this period, though not entirely
impossible if you go out far enough so you pose no danger to the general
infrastructure. I don’t think Bushmen in the Kalahari or Inuit in Nunavut are
in any more danger than they usually are. Short of that though, individuals
trying to maintain independent subsitence lives closer to the core are likely to
be periodically sprayed with Anthrax to keep their population down.
How LONG does this period of Extreme Fascism last here? That is a matter for
conjecture, a lot depends on how quickly remaining Oil resource is expended in
the international and local Wars for hegemony over the remaining resource. It
depends on how much salvageable high EROEI Oil is left after these first major
wars are “completed”. The Timeline in the aftermath of the major wars could go
anywhere from 20 years to a few Centuries.
In the very long term, the Core will become very small, all the logistics
involved with moving around the Oil will become impossible with the small
population remaining, and what is left of the population of Hom Sapiens will
migrate outward again, without fear that they will be periodically sprayed with
Anthrax in Death from Above. How long before that time arrives? At least a
Century IMHO, though with a real big War here it could come faster than that.
For anyone CURRENTLY alive, you first off want to be in a location that the Core
will Protect, and second off you have to find some means of being Useful to
either corporate or Goobermint Employers to avoid falling off the cliff.
Developing good Barter skills and having something worth Bartering can help here
during this period, such as learning to Bootleg Whisky as my Grandpa did.
Likely to be a good deal more DANGEROUS this go round then it was in Grandpa’s
time when it was already pretty dangerous, but still possible.
Really your Job here through this period is not one of trying to figure out how
to destroy the system, because the system is going to destroy itself. Neither
is your job to Kill others to maintain your lifestyle, since others will die off
by the truckload here no matter what. Your JOB is simply to figure out the best
means of SURVIVAL while everybody around you is DIEING. If you can make it
THROUGH the Zero Point, if you or your progeny can SURVIVE long enough,
eventually the playing field will be level enough again to build a Better
Tomorrow, but that will definitely NOT come in our lifetimes.
Here in the FSofA, you are actually Positioned Better than most places on Earth.
The FSofA is essentially the Belly of the Beast, in control of the Big Ass
Military. For so long as this Military machine holds its Integrity, you do NOT
want to be on the Other side. How LONG here this military retains its integrity
is an open question. I would give it no more than 5 years after a major War
with Iran over their Oil fields is undertaken. Once integrity is lost in the
Military, its all a Crapshoot after that.
Keep your head down, develop numerous means of surviving in different
circumstances, stay ahead of the curve and remain as flexible as you can in your
location and your ethics also. SURVIVE! Do you HEAR me? (channelling Hawkeye
here) Do whatever it takes, and keep your Ethics Negotiable. You only make the
Ethical fight when your back is to the WALL. Then, and only then do you GO
BALLISTIC. You take NO PRISONERS. You go all out in a Blaze of Glory, firing
on all cylinders to take out just as many as you can before you go to the Great
Beyond. You will go to Everlasting glory in the Kingdom of Heaven.
See You on the Other Side.
RE
Post by: RE on February 25, 2015, 01:09:56 AM
What is truly INCREDIBLE is how I pegged the Oil Price Collapse, the Sovereign Debt Bubble and the Grexit issues 4 years before they occurred! The series is dated 2012, but in reality I wrote it on Reverse Engineering in 2011 prior to setting up the Diner.
FROM PART II:
With the Sovereign Debt Bubble in Europe now on its last legs, there just isn’t any bigger Debtor left upon which to shift the burden of debt accumulated since Industrialism began, mainly in the aftermath of the Civil War here in the FSofA. Though it began with the Steam Engine in the 1750s, the Agrarian Model was not completely supplanted by Industrialization until after the Civil War. So we are talking a good 150 years of debt overburden accumulated here. To wipe out this debt takes a World War that makes WWII look like a small skirmish in your backyard between your kids and their cousins. What the FORM of this war will take though remains to be seen.
What you see occuring here between Iran and the FSoA in the Blustering is mainly an attempt to keep the price of Oil propped up a while longer. Real demand for Oil is Cratering as the Konsumers run out of available credit to buy it with. Military posturing both increases Demand for Oil (how much Oil do you think both the Iranians and the FSofA consume in a Day of Wargames?), and it instills FEAR into the Market Place that what is left of the supply is soon to be CUT OFF.
Thing is here, blustering isn’t going to increase real demand for Oil from the Konsumer level, no matter how bellicose either side gets here, J6P STILL does not have money to buy this stuff at high prices. In fact at ANY price soon enough, but if they let it drop down to $2/gal for gas again you would get another Dead Cat Bounce in the economy.
At this price though, the Oil Companies/MIC cannot make a profit, nor can the Mullahs pay their bills. It is in the interest of neither side to see the price of Oil drop here. By seriously cutting production the Saudis could SLIGHTLY raise the price of Oil, but that would be made up for by Ruskies exporting more. The Saudis though need every Dollar they can get, so they are not going to lower production and sales. Sell less at a higher price maybe keeps you even, but only if somebody else doesn’t capture your market share. With declining real demand, only if ALL producers cut their production could you stay even.
So, blustering about War is the best means available to prop up the price in the Speculator market, but at the end of the line if the price is too high, it won’t move out of the storage facilities fast enough. At this point, blustering is not enough, you need a REAL War to suck up that excess Oil and to keep the FEAR level at a Fever Pitch.
It remains to be seen which side Flinches First, but once Fear Mongering stops working to keep the price up, REAL War becomes necessary. The Price cannot stay up indefinitely at high levels if the end Konsumer does not have money to pay for it. Either you go to War to REALLY restrict the supply, or you let the Price Collapse some. It could go either way here.
Certainly,a Price Collapse would be better for FSofA Konsumers and Industry. it would not be better for TBTF Banks and Oil Companies though. It would be horrific for Oil Producing countries dependent on the revenue from Oil to support their economies. Already weakened Regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran would undoubtably collapse if Oil drops into the $60 or below range again. The Iranians being the most pressured here with Sanctions are the most likely to strike out if there is a collapse in Oil prices.
The scenario as a result that seems most likely is for the Posturing to continue for so long as it keeps the prices up, but when the Storage Facilities are full to the Brim and Overflowing, then the Price will collapse and the Iranians will strike out first.
The ensuing Melee is simply too complex to figure out. Reduced real Oil supplies will take many peripheral areas with current Credit issues off the map as far as any Oil delivery whatsoever is concerned. Greeks for instance won’t be able to buy even a DROP of Oil with the New Drachma. The FSofA likely would institute a Rationing system of some sort. Normal commerce would slow to a snail’s crawl. Unemployment would skyrocket.
The series holds up very well today, a full 3 years after its original Publication on the Diner shortly after we Opened for Bizness. :icon_sunny:
RE
Post by: Palloy on February 26, 2015, 08:47:41 PM
Or were you planning on winning the war without taking any hits, like in WW1 and 2?
And no "lone wolf" sabotage?
http://rt.com/usa/235927-arizona-internet-outage-vandals/ (http://rt.com/usa/235927-arizona-internet-outage-vandals/)
Vandals cause chaos as Arizona goes internet-free for 15 hours
February 27, 2015
From Phoenix to Flagstaff, residents couldn’t get cash from the ATM, 911 systems were disrupted and credit card purchases couldn’t be processed because a cut fiber-optic internet cable buried in the desert disabled internet service for hours.
Phoenix police spokesman Officer James Holmes told AP the cable cutting vandals were probably looking for cooper wire after probably using power tools to cut the cable. Copper wire fetches high prices as scrap, though the vandals didn’t find any.
"Your average house saw and wire cutters wouldn't do it," Holmes told the news outlet. He said the damage was estimated at $6,000. Holmes said any charges resulting would not be limited to just vandalism.
Service was finally fully restored early Thursday morning after 15 hours of interrupted service, according to the Associated Press.
http://missoulian.com/uncategorized/man-shoots-alaska-pipeline-causes-massive-leak/article_55d30af8-c30c-5585-bb81-3d3c074eabda.html (http://missoulian.com/uncategorized/man-shoots-alaska-pipeline-causes-massive-leak/article_55d30af8-c30c-5585-bb81-3d3c074eabda.html)
Man shoots Alaska pipeline; causes massive leak
6 Oct 2001
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Oil spewed like a geyser from the trans-Alaska oil pipeline Friday, more than 24 hours after a man shot a hole in the line.
Crews struggled to install a clamp to stop the leak and clean up more than 260,000 gallons of oil. The work was proceeding slowly due to explosive vapors at the site, said Brad Hahn of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
The man suspected of shooting the pipeline with a .338-caliber rifle, Daniel Carson Lewis, 37, was arraigned Friday on charges of criminal mischief, driving while intoxicated, weapons misconduct and felony assault.
Post by: RE on February 26, 2015, 09:33:05 PM
I can't go along with electronic money being available after WW3, because it relies on thousands of miles of optical fibre, network nodes, giant servers, local computers, electricity, hence power stations, coal mines, bulldozers, trucks, maintenance vehicles, diesel and gasoline, oil wells, refineries, distribution systems, food for all the workers, clean water, sewerage, and so on.
Or were you planning on winning the war without taking any hits, like in WW1 and 2?
And no "lone wolf" sabotage?
The attempt to use all electronic money only lasts as long as the infrastructure does, clearly.
This is something the Illuminati will TRY to do, but if/when we go to a full scale war complete with missile exchanges (even non-Nuke), that plan won't last long.
Only if they manage to keep this limited to Proxy Wars and gradually cut off various neighborhoods like Ukraine, Greece etc will such a thing be possible inside the core countries, and only for a limited time.
RE